ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2020
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Sidharth Puram, MD, PhD, received dual degrees in Biology and Neuroscience from MIT, followed by an MD/PhD at Harvard Medical School with doctoral studies in the laboratory of Dr. Azad Bonni, where he studied EGFR signaling in glioma and centrosomal regulators of dendrite morphogenesis. He went on to complete his Postdoctoral Fellowship with Dr. Bradley Bernstein at MIT Broad/Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Puram is currently an Assistant Professor and Head and Neck Surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis, where his group focuses on genetic, transcriptional, and epigenetic heterogeneity in head and neck cancer and its relationship to cancer phenotypes such as metastasis, drug resistance, and local invasion that may be driven by tumor subpopulations. During his postdoctoral training, Dr. Puram completed the first major single cell RNA-sequencing analysis of an epithelial malignancy (carcinoma), identifying a partial epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition program which appears to trigger metastasis, poor outcomes, and extra-capsular extension/lymphovascular invasion. These studies have been the foundation for further studies of the pathways that may drive the p-EMT state, and in particular, biomarkers of p-EMT that may be used to predict patient outcomes. In addition, Dr. Puram’s group is utilizing advanced genomic techniques to characterize changes in heterogeneity upon immunotherapy, as well as determining how heterogeneity may change in distinct head and neck cancer subsites including HPV-related oropharynx tumors and larynx cancers. Dr. Puram plans to utilize patient-derived xenograft models and organoids to further study these early findings. His research related to head and neck tumor heterogeneity has been awarded a Cancer Research Foundation Young Investigator Award, American Society for Clinical Investigation Young Physician-Scientist Award, and a V Scholar Grant as well as NIH K-series support.